


trust/fall

by strangehunger



Series: Locked Tomb Piercing and Tattoos, est. 2019 [1]
Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Tattoo Parlor, Canon Typical Dark Humor and Bad Jokes, F/F, Flirting, Gideon the Ninth Holiday Exchange, Harrow POV, Mentions of Needles and Blood, Mutual Pining, Piercings, Pining, Tattoo Artist! Gideon, Tattoos, and intimate, getting a tattoo from your “sworn enemy” is something that can be so personal, gtn2019exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:54:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22357495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangehunger/pseuds/strangehunger
Summary: Harrow Nonagesimus approached the chair with the same enthusiasm of one stepping up to the executioner’s block. Just like those same damned siouls, she found herself running through the events of her life, trying to find the thread of ill fortune running through her past that had led to her current predicament. Others might have found themselves praying, begging like a child for the attention and forgiveness of a merciful God, but Harrow knew better. There was no God — and if there was, it certainly wasn’t merciful.Because if therewasa merciful God, Gideon wouldn’t have a giant fucking needle in her hand.________________________In which Gideon is a tattoo artist, Harrow is a piercer, and Harrow loses a bet.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Series: Locked Tomb Piercing and Tattoos, est. 2019 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1691857
Comments: 21
Kudos: 296





	trust/fall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nutmeag83](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nutmeag83/gifts).



> Hello! This is a gift for the wonderful [nutmeag](%E2%80%9C), who happens to be both my gift-ee and gift-er for the Gideon the Ninth Holiday Gift Exchange! I’m very excited to be sharing this, and also sorry that it came a bit late. Thank you so much to everyone who participated, and for our dear Erin for arranging it! 
> 
> Also thank you to.... literally everyone I know for letting me shop this around and beta it. Jay, Lindsay, Helen, Cheyanne.......... it should not take a village. And yet. Thanks especially to Lindsay, who is responsible for the bet that Harrow and Gideon make, and therefore responsible for a LOT of bad flirting. 
> 
> Warning: This book does go in some detail on the topics of piercings and tattoos and the processes of creating them. If needles or blood make you uncomfortable, this might not be the best fic for you! I tried not to make it graphic, but it might be uncomfortable nonetheless. Another warning: I, unfortunately, have never had a tattoo in my life, so apologize if any of this is inaccurate. Also, don’t try this at home. 
> 
> Enjoy!

Harrow Nonagesimus approached the chair with the same enthusiasm of one stepping up to the executioner’s block. Just like those same damned souls, she found herself running through the events of her life, trying to find the thread of ill fortune running through her past that had led to her current predicament. Others might have found themselves praying, begging like a child for the attention and forgiveness of a merciful God, but Harrow knew better. There was no God — and if there was, it certainly wasn’t  _ merciful. _

If there was a merciful God, Harrow wouldn’t have had to come into the shop on a Monday. 

“Don’t look so bummed, Nonagesimus,” said Gideon, who was preparing a workstation that was as heinous to Harrow as that of a mortician. ( _ Worse,  _ actually; growing up in a funeral home will do that to you.) “Other women have spent big bucks to spend some time in that chair with me.” 

If there was a merciful God, Harrow wouldn’t have to stare at Gideon and her shit-eating grin. 

“Those other women are idiots,” Harrow said bluntly. She eased herself into the chair. She pressed her fingers into the soft padding of the plastic-covered seat, felt it depress under her fingertips. How strange it was to sit here, in this chair that she had seen nearly every day for the last two years. How strange, and how unexpectedly  _ frightening.  _ “Most likely blind as well.”

And if there was a merciful God, Gideon wouldn’t have a  _ giant fucking needle  _ in her hand. 

It was a far cry from the elegant needles that Harrow used in her own work, sterile and slender and sated in an instant. Her art occurred in the split of a second, the flash of near-fluorescent light glinting off metal as it sunk into skin — and then it was over. Even in fairly difficult locations, Harrow found the process beautiful in its simplicity. 

The unwieldy tattoo gun in Gideon’s hand looked anything  _ but  _ simple, and it was  _ certainly  _ not beautiful. It was a dark, ugly thing, an inelegant needle jutting out of a bulky, black body. In the wrong hands, it was almost as bad as an  _ actual  _ gun; Harrow had seen some of the tattoos Gideon’s clients came in to cover, and none of them were pretty. 

Harrow sat ramrod straight in the chair. She hadn’t yet decided if Gideon’s hands were the right ones. 

Currently, said hands were wrapped in light-blue rubber, the only spot of color Gideon wore, aside from her stupid red hair and the vibrant tattoos that trailed up both of her arms, tattoos that seemed to shift with each of her movements, slightly exaggerated by the ripple of muscle under heavily inked skin…

Harrow forced herself to focus on the gun. Better than those arms. Better than whatever river of asinine bullshit was flowing from Gideon’s open mouth. 

“You could have prevented this, you know,” Gideon said, and Harrow restrained the urge to lean forward and impale that empty, yellow-eyed head on the tattoo gun. Gideon, oblivious to the scenes of violence that danced through Harrow’s mind, gave the gun an experimental twirl. “If you had done your  _ research. _ ” 

Harrow’s mouth curled in displeasure. “The subject matter was  _ ghastly. _ ”

Any reputable piercer or tattoo artist would refuse to work on an inebriated client. The reasons for this were myriad. A Prince Albert or a tattoo of Steve Buschemi straddling a bottle of vodka might  _ seem  _ like a perfectly good idea to the liquor-addled mind, but it rarely held up once last night’s buzz yielded to tomorrow’s hangover. Many clients suffered from impaired judgement enough when  _ sober —  _ Harrow could hardly imagine the horrors they might concoct while drunk. The thinning of blood certainly didn’t help either; the  _ less  _ blood Harrow had to deal with at work, the better. She wasn’t about to have some teenaged sorority girl gushing blood onto her work bench after drinking too many Mai-Tai’s at happy hour. Getting a tattoo or piercing were firmly on top Harrow’s list of things to avoid while drunk.

Making a bet with Gideon Nav was now also at the top of that list. 

Friday the thirteenth. The four of them that kept  _ The Locked Tomb  _ afloat had made their way to a local dive bar after a day so long it had left Harrow’s head swimming. Gideon and Camilla’s schedules had been cleared for the day, each of them working their way through a flash sheet while Palamedes ran himself ragged in the front room, dispensing waivers to a bunch of people who had clearly never been touched by a needle in their lives. Harrow’s line of clients had been out the door; she had spent hours on a steady stream of people eager to pay thirteen dollars for a sitting fee, followed by an egregious amount on jewelry. 

Two drinks had carried Harrow away from the stresses of the day. Three had embarked her on what Palamedes would later refer to as  _ A mating dance of idiocy. _

Her life had been vastly easier when she and Gideon had  _ actually  _ hated each other, when the two of them had spent those early months of cohabitation trying to stay out of one another’s orbit. When the only words they had traded had been barbed comments about the other’s skill, or clientele, or attitude, or appearance, or  _ anything  _ that could possibly have them with their teeth cutting the other’s throat. Gideon had been loud and hotheaded, Harrow quiet and coldhearted. They had clashed on every level. 

Until they hadn’t. 

When they still hated each other, Harrow would have taken Gideon’s arm off at the elbow for daring to touch her. Instead, her gaze had simply drifted down when the pad of Gideon’s finger had tapped at the skin of her right clavicle, just below a dermal anchor of dark stone, and asked, “How many?”

“Get your filthy hand off of my  _ open wound, _ ” Harrow had said, performatively swatting at Gideon’s hand as if the brush of her calloused fingers  _ didn’t  _ feel nice on Harrow’s cold skin. “How many do you think?”

Gideon had chewed half heartedly at a lemon wedge. “What do I get if I’m right?” 

“A shot.” 

“Tequila?”

“No. To the head.”

And then Gideon had tossed her stupid head back and  _ laughed,  _ and Harrow, who was completely unaccustomed to making people laugh, had spilled gin on herself. 

It had all been downhill from there, really. She had remembered it in startling clarity the next morning, even through the unfamiliar fog of a hangover. The two of them, back and forth, trading shots and bets,  _ I’ll show you mine if you show me yours first,  _ continuously upping the stakes as they leaned over that sticky bar, trying to guess each others’ tattoos and piercings, the various modifications, their various placements. 

“And whoever wins?”

Gideon had mulled that over for a moment. At that point, Camilla had long since given up banging her head on the counter and wandered off to decimate some of the other patrons in a game of pool. Palamedes, still at Harrow’s side, had tried to gently talk Gideon and Harrow out of their little game with an unflagging sense of rationality that was altogether lost on their late-stage inebriation. 

“Goes under the needle,” Gideon had said. ( _ Slurred  _ was probably more apt.) “Dealer’s choice.” 

They had clinked shots over it, loud enough to drown out Palamedes’ appeals to reason. 

Harrow had started with the visible ones, the ones that traced their ways over Gideon’s strong arms, down to her firm wrists. The immense sword that ran up the smooth skin of her inner forearm, a symbol of strength inked onto an altogether fragile place. The snake that coiled itself around one bicep, the pinup girl posed alluringly on the other. A bold labrys on the back of the same shoulder, in case the pinup had left any questions about the nature of Gideon’s desires. The near-countless flash tattoos scattered across her body, small and inharmonious, minuscule labors of love from other friends in the profession. 

And then, they had gone deeper. 

The beautifully wrought tattoo of a skeleton embracing a woman on her upper thigh, because having one naked woman permanently marked onto her body apparently wasn’t enough for Gideon. That had been one of Camilla’s best, the intricate lines of her work as smooth and flawless as ever. It graced the same leg as a spaceship beaming up an unsuspecting cow. The death head’s moth that fluttered at one hipbone. A line of Latin script scrolling up the side of her torso that Harrow was  _ certain  _ had gone through no further measure of proofreading than Google translate. 

It was strange, how exposed Harrow had felt even as she picked Gideon apart, laying her bare over the bar with quiet words. Her voice had touched what her hands could not, unraveling the lines of ink across Gideon’s body and wondering if Gideon could tell what Harrow never would. If she knew the way that Harrow’s dark eyes followed her every movement, the way that Harrow dissected her with each interaction — as if she could just peel away the layers, peel away the clothing, peel away the tattoos, and find something else of Gideon, something only she could see. 

She knew those pieces of Gideon that were splattered across her exposed skin, and even those that were hidden, more private. Gideon was neither  _ discreet  _ nor  _ quiet,  _ and those tattoos Harrow hadn’t seen, she hard certainly heard of. She could only imagine them — the outline of plastic vampire teeth on Gideon’s inner thigh, exactly the same place Harrow might want to sink her own teeth into, or the dagger that ran up the seam between her breasts, the tip of which Harrow forced herself to look away from when Gideon wore even a moderately low-cut shirt. Harrow watched, and she listened, and, like a collector, she catalogued all that she couldn’t have. 

She knew them all. 

All but  _ one.  _

“Close, my dark lady!” Gideon had said. She had taken a swig off of her vodka soda, as if to wet her throat from the immense strain of rattling off a litany of Harrow’s piercings — and their official placements, to even the playing field. With a face and ears full of metal, half of them were easy — and then there had been the hidden ones. The line of anchors down her spine, the few across her collarbones, the belly button piercing that Harrow rarely admitted to. Judging by the way Gideon’s eyebrows had shot up when Harrow did not refute nipple piercings, she had mostly meant  _ that one  _ as a joke, but she was correct nonetheless. In total, there were twenty seven piercings on Harrowhark Nonagesimus’ body, and Gideon had correctly guessed each one. 

Which had left Harrow helpless as Gideon had lifted her shirt up, exposing a brand new bandage slapped onto one of the only patches of (previously) unmarked skin. 

“Better luck next time.”

A skull wearing sunglasses. Of all the  _ stupid  _ things Gideon Nav could possibly want to immortalize on her equally stupid body. Harrow had never wanted to strangle someone so much in her entire life. Herself or Gideon, she wasn’t sure. 

“Almost ready, my penumbral mistress?” Gideon asked, bringing Harrow back to the present. 

Harrow felt as ready for this tattoo as she did for her own funeral, and she said as much. 

Gideon laughed, and Harrow hated her for it. Her face felt warm, and she hated herself even more. 

“Hey, you’re sure dressed for it,” Gideon said. She nodded at Harrow’s all black ensemble — looser and more casual than her usual attire, what with the purpose of this encounter. In her hands, Gideon fumbled with a roll of dark, gauzy tape and said, “Are you sure you don’t want to see it first?”

“As much as I’d like to witness my own execution,” Harrow drawled. 

“Drama queen.” 

“I have no idea what kind of mess you could have possibly concocted in that empty little head of yours,” Harrow said. “Best to just get it over with and suffer the consequences.” 

Gideon laughed,  _ again.  _ Harrow almost wished she would stop doing that. Almost. “Ye of little faith.” The tape in Gideon’s head went flying, tracing an arc into the space between them. Harrow snatched it from the air as it whizzed past her. “Shirt off, you know the drill.”

Harrow did know the drill. In  _ her  _ profession, she had seen enough nude strangers to last a lifetime. A tattoo artist, at least, could cover the important bits. Gideon had the decency to turn around while Harrow did so, but she did  _ not  _ have the decency to shut her mouth. 

“It’s gonna be badass. Think, like, a skull, but it’s on fire. And it’s like, puking  _ another _ skull, which is also on fire. Which is puking—”

“ _ Spare _ me.” 

“— another, even smaller skull. But, like, tasteful.” 

“So tasteful,” droned Harrow tonelessly, taken up by a fantasy in which she impaled herself on the tattoo gun and called it good. She had spent the last two weeks dreading this day, wondering if she wouldn’t end up with something asinine or vulgar stamped onto the side of her face for the rest of her life. 

The small room was cold, and yet when Gideon leaned in toward Harrow’s side to recline the chair, Harrow felt as if every nerve ending was on fire. Gideon’s short hair tickled at Harrow’s arm, and Harrow forced herself to sit very, very still, as she was lowered backwards. She was left supine, staring up at the ceiling like a body laid out on a stretcher.

Suddenly, her vision was filled with Gideon. Her red hair fell over her forehead. Her eyes, twin coins of gold, were shadowed as they looked down at Harrow’s small face. 

“Do you trust me?”

_ More than I would like to,  _ Harrow thought.  _ More than I trust myself.  _

The only response she gave Gideon was a small jerk of her head. 

The first brush of Gideon’s gloved fingers against her skin had Harrow nearly vaulting from the bench. She held back the urge to sit up and look down as Gideon’s fingers brushed across the thin skin over her sternum, over her ribs, with something wet and soft — washing the area with a solution of alcohol, no doubt. Harrow found her interest piqued. Even the location of the tattoo was a revelation, and she fought back the tendril of anxiety that crept up her skin as Gideon mapped out the area. 

Gideon was chatty with her clients. Historically, this had been terrible for Harrow’s blood pressure; initially it had simply been  _ annoying  _ to listen to Gideon joke with clients while they attempted to flirt  _ at  _ her, but recently it had been outright  _ infuriating  _ for reasons that Harrow was trying her best to avoid. Normally, Gideon’s buoyant laugh could be heard across the shop, all the way into the little room just down the hall where Harrow spent all day jamming needles into her clients. 

She must have sensed Harrow’s trepidation, however, because her voice was quieter when she said, “Keep squirming like that and you’re going to have a fucked up tattoo, Nonagesimus.” 

“That’s  _ your  _ responsibility,” said Harrow cuttingly. Something else ghosted over her skin, something smooth and cold. She didn’t have to look to know what it was — a razor, tasked with parting fine hair from the smooth skin of her torso. Gideon’s large hands were exceedingly gentle. “Of all the places…”

“Hey,” said Gideon defensively, her razor gently tracing up the expanse of Harrow’s sternum. “You only said not to do it somewhere visible. At least here—” she tapped the razor against Harrow’s rib, and Harrow could already tell it was going to  _ hurt  _ “— you know that no one will ever see it. Ever.”

“Thanks,” Harrow said tonelessly. 

“You know. Like, ever in a million years. Except maybe a coroner.” A beat passed. “Y’know, because—”

“Did no one ever think to drown you at birth?” Harrow asked abruptly.

“I was too cute,” Gideon said, shit eating grin firmly affixed in place. Unfortunately she had a point. That was perhaps the only reason that Harrow hadn’t outright murdered her in the shop already. That, and the fact that it was terribly unsanitary to do so in a body modification shop. 

The stencil came next. Harrow wondered what it looked like. She lay as still as possible, but couldn’t help averting her eyes from one side to the other, trying to catch a glimpse of one of the many images splayed across the walls of Gideon’s little studio. Try as Harrow might to deny it, Gideon had talent — and more importantly,  _ skill.  _ The room was wallpapered with sketches of Gideon’s, not dissimilar to the to the ones she would pen onto napkins at bars or in the margins of a sketchbook that went pretty much everywhere with her. Overlapping those were other images — pictures of healed tattoos, all of them done in her signature style. Her works were bold and bright, their vibrancy towering over Harrow like a threat. Few and far between, one might find more simple styles, the clean black lines and clever shading that Harrow preferred, but that wasn’t what most of Gideon’s clients came to her for. 

She flicked her gaze from the walls back to the (as of yet) unmarked expanse of her skin. She could just barely see bluish lines splaying over her sternum, though she couldn’t quite tell what she was looking at. Gideon was going over the stencil with a marker and reshaping bits of the design, forming it to Harrow’s body, the mold of her ribcage, the dip of her sternum. 

Gideon paused. She  _ looked _ , her amber eyes trained on Harrow in concentration. No, not on Harrow — on her  _ work,  _ on those unknown lines that she had traced across Harrow’s skin, a masterpiece in the making. Or the most elaborate dick joke of the century. Harrow wasn’t sure yet, but she felt a shiver run up in her spine regardless, the weight of those eyes on her skin unbearable. Even more unbearable that they weren’t  _ truly  _ looking at her. 

“Are you sure about this?” 

Harrow looked up. Gideon was watching her now. Gideon was watching  _ her,  _ those infuriating eyes trained on Harrow’s darker ones as she swapped her gloves out for a new set. She seemed… nervous, perhaps, if there was a universe in which Gideon Nav was able to feel  _ nervous,  _ rather than annoyingly, infuriatingly,  _ attractively,  _ arrogant. 

“I don’t suppose it matters,” said Harrow drily, “because by the time you get around to doing it, I will have wasted away into old age.”

“Ha  _ ha,  _ asshole, I’m being serious,” Gideon said, which was alarming in and of itself, because Gideon was  _ never  _ serious. Not unless it included food or half-naked women. (Well. Harrow supposed  _ one  _ of those was present.) “Like, if you really,  _ really  _ don’t want to do this, you don’t have to.” 

Harrow inclined her neck slightly to look at Gideon. “I—”

“Like, you know this will hurt, right? Because—”

“It’s a giant fucking  _ needle.  _ Of course I know it’s going to hurt, you golden-eyed idiot,” Harrow said. She dropped her head back against the bench. The plastic covering crackled under her short hair. “I wouldn’t have signed the consent form if I didn’t trust you  _ weren’t  _ going to inscribe a giant phallus on my chest.”

“Well there goes that idea.”

“ _ Gideon Nav _ —”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Gideon, tattoo gun in hand. “Just remember, you can’t sue me if you don’t like it.” She paused, and said, “Let me know if I need to stop.”

The only thing Gideon  _ needed to stop _ , was looking at Harrow like that — with her big yellow eyes full of concern. Possibly with  _ care,  _ too, which was completely unacceptable if Harrow wanted to live through the end of the session. 

It wasn’t the first time Harrow had gone under the needle. She had a face full of metal and a handful of tattoos — small things dropped here and there. Most of them aesthetic rather than emotional, small and beautifully wrought works of bold, black ink. Harrow was neither sentimental nor symbolic, She didn’t need to spray the entire sordid story of her life down the side of her body in bold ink, and she needed neither bruise nor tattoo to poke at while she recounted some story or another. Unlike Gideon, she saw little appeal in wearing her heart on her sleeve.

Instead, she kept it in her hands — three lines of Roman numerals running down three of her fingers, the only thing approaching sentimental that she would allow to be stamped onto her body. Three dates, two of them the same, one different. One for her mother and one for her father. One for Alecto. Those ones hurt for an entirely different reason than this new one did. 

But  _ fuck,  _ did this one hurt. Harrow forced herself to grit her teeth and bear it. One of Gideon’s hands was gentle but firm where it lay splayed on her side, holding the skin taut. The other held the tattoo gun, tracing a line of fire across the skin of her left rib. She felt the vibration of the machine all the way down to her very core, into her teeth, as if someone was carving straight past the skin and into bone. 

Gideon talked as she went, providing small affirmations and status updates. Harrow lay as still as she possibly could during the entire ordeal, feeling very much like one of the many bodies that had made their way into her parents’ funeral home during her childhood. Perhaps equally as miserable as well. 

She forced herself to focus on Gideon — Gideon with her strong, steady hands. Gideon, who was humming completely off-key along with the radio, the same awful sound that would sometimes bring Harrow to a standstill in the hallway. Gideon, whose gentle hands left works of art painted across everyone they touched. Harrow had hated her brash mouth and her stupid red hair from the moment they met, when Gideon had done little more than smile in her direction. Now she couldn’t bring herself to hate Gideon even if she tried. 

That was, of course, subject to change. At present, the needle in Gideon’s hand had moved to the thin flesh of her sternum, and Harrow was finding it easier to hate her with each passing minute. 

Relief flooded Harrow when Gideon started rattling off a spiel about aftercare. Even after the tattoo gun had turned off, Harrow could still feel its vibration dancing in her teeth, ringing in her ears. Whatever Gideon had done to her, it was the biggest piece she had to date, and her back ached from laying in the same position for so long. She attempted to push herself up on her haunches, perhaps more roughly than was necessary. 

“Hey, careful, that’s an  _ open wound  _ you’ve got there,” Gideon said. She nudged at Harrow’s shoulder, easing her back down, and Harrow was forced to undergo a further tirade on aftercare as Gideon cleaned the tattoo one last time. She blotted the blood from the skin one more time, and then set about applying a thin layer of Saniderm, her hands leaving goosebumps where it pressed against Harrow’s skin to smooth the wrap out. “It’ll probably bleed, so I definitely recommend  _ not  _ wearing white — well, for you,  _ ever, _ ” Gideon said, peeling the gloves from her hands and dropping them in a bin. By the time she finished washing her hands, Harrow was already struggling into a sitting position. 

“ _ Careful,  _ you’re going to ruin my hard work.” Hands — warm, slightly damp, and  _ bare  _ — closed around Harrow’s shoulders. A shiver ran down her spine as Gideon helped ease her into a sitting position. “You took it like a champ, though.”

“I’m not scared of a little needle, Nav,” said Harrow haughtily, as if she hadn’t just been grinding her teeth down to the gum not even ten minutes ago. The tattoo still burned, but more annoyingly, it  _ itched,  _ and Harrow wondered how she was going to wear a shirt without wanting to peel her skin from her body for the next week or so. From Gideon’s estimates, it would take six months to heal. Annoying, but far better than some of her dermals, Harrow supposed. 

Gideon disappeared from her side. When she returned, she held a hand mirror. 

Harrow froze. 

She wondered if she looked as frightened as Gideon did. Gideon  _ had  _ always worn her heart on her shoulder. Unease played across her features, plain as day. Harrow, in contrast, steeled herself, schooling her expression and features into something inscrutable. It was the same cold mask of marble she donned for all of her interactions with Gideon, one that the tattoo artist had been slowly chipping away at ever since they met. 

Wordlessly, Harrow held out a hand. 

Harrow had expected… Harrow wasn’t certain what she had expected. Something bright and flamboyant, one of Gideon’s usual pieces, a neo-traditionalist burst of color across her ribs. A giant phallus, or even Gideon making good on her threat of flaming skulls regurgitating one another. Though Harrow (against her better judgment) had come to nurture something of a soft spot for the other girl, she was undeniably and irrevocably… kind of a dick. And yet Harrow had, for some reason, put her trust in Gideon’s hands. 

The tattoo that Gideon had inked just under Harrow’s small breasts was black but for the gaps of color filled by her skin. Two skeletal hands curving to meet at her sternum, metacarpals and phalanges smoothly rendered and lovingly shaded. Index finger of each skeletal hand curved around the sloping base of a dainty wishbone, its stem tracing up her sternum. A fracture crawled across one leg of the wishbone, threatening to snap. 

_ Better luck next time,  _ Gideon had said in the bar, tongue thick with tequila and a cocky smile on her face. 

Gideon didn’t look so cocky now, though she sure tried. When Harrow lifted her gaze from the hand mirror, Gideon wore that same nervous expression she had just before taking the tattoo gun to Harrow’s skin. She looked unsure.  _ Shy _ , almost. It was lovely, a singular cut of a kaleidoscope of Gideons that Harrow had never seen before. She wanted to see more. 

“What do you think?” Gideon asked. 

Harrow set the mirror aside. Her heart pounded against her chest, thrumming with the same persistence as the needle that had just inked the tattoo onto her skin. Wordlessly, she reached out to bunch her fingers into the dark fabric of Gideon’s shirt. They seemed small and as foreign as those newly inked onto her skin. When Harrow pulled, Gideon followed. 

Harrow was the one to close the distance. She craned her neck ever so slightly and pressed her lips to Gideon’s. 

And made a wish. 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed! Comments and kudos are always accepted. 
> 
> The inspiration for Harrow’s tattoos were something like: (all of these, being sternum/underbust tattoos, are somewhat NSFW) [this](https://pin.it/epd7cwtldfltcm) and[this](https://pin.it/axuqqaoxslp5kz), kind of on the simpler side. No real symbolism, other than a) I like them b) it suited the story and c) who doesn’t love Harrow + some skeletons?
> 
> And again, I know it’s belated, but happy holidays, nutmeag <3
> 
> I’m on tumblr as strangehunger as well! Come scream about Gideon the Ninth!


End file.
